Thuuuhhh Yankees…get wet.

It was time, finally, to find a day to take my kids to the new Yankee Stadium. After all, we’d been to the old one, once, years ago. Thanks to Stubhub I managed to find $10 seats in the nosebleed section for last night’s game, on a day when Guilderland Schools had a day off.

Now, I’ve been a Yankee fan since 1961, a good year to start (Mantle, Maris, home runs…). My kids are now Yankee fans. My daughter loves Jorge Posada, my son Derek, I think. I’m a fan of A-Rod because everyone else hates him. And we all loved Bernie. Mickey Mantle might still be my one and only life hero.

But going to the Stadium (it’s so special it gets a capital S) is a big deal. Tickets anywhere you can actually see, I thought, would be like paying college tuition, plus the parking, food, and 6-hour round trip. Daunting.

And yet we went. We arrived at 5:15 for a 7:00 game, a meaningless, we’ve-already-clinched game against a bad team, where, we realized, almost everyone who played for the Yankees would be the subs, including a pitcher we’d barely heard of. But we went. Katy in her Posada shirt, me in my Mantle shirt, Mikey in his Yankees cap.

And we loved the Stadium. There’s something about the feeling you get when you walk out from under all the concrerte and see the green field. That first moment is magical.

We walked around a bit and decided that I was all wrong about the seats: you can see from anywhere even the bleachers. The view from the nosebleed seats was fine! (We were 3 rows from the very back, high enough above third base that small aircraft flew below us on the way to LaGuardia.)

And what a view we had…of the rain. It rained, and rained, and slowed, and then rained. And it was a school night, with a 3-hour drive ahead of us. So after 45 minutes of rain delay we gave up. In fact, the delay would stretch to 2 hours, and then the game would be played.

But it wasn’t so bad. We loved the trip, we loved seeing the new stadium, we loved walking around, we loved the whole feeling. And the pizza and ice cream we really good! (I had to sell a kidney to pay the bill.)